Category: Interviews

Lui Nemeth and Andrew Grune spend most of their days in a tiny railway arch underneath Haggerston station in East London. The space, which is half the size of most Berlin kitchens, is home to PRIMITIVE LONDON, a fashion and art collective showcasing underground Japanese and British designers. The two are currently preparing for a one week pop-up shop in Berlin, running from October 7-14th at VOO.
I met up with them to talk about the history of the shop and their plans for Berlin.

Chinawoman is Michelle, a Toronto-born musician with Russian roots who moved to Berlin nearly a year ago. Her music evokes images of Soviet Ballrooms of the 80s and Douglas Sirk melodramas, and she’s been compared to Leonard Cohen, Nico, and Angelo Badalamenti. But for all the grandiosity, you wouldn’t expect that both her albums were produced and recorded in her bedroom. I met with her on a gloomy Friday afternoon in Kreuzberg to talk about her music.

This week Berlin’s biggest film festival Berlinale is taking over the cinemas of the town screening more than 400 films in seven sections. To get a grip on the huge program we met the director of Forum, the section focussing on international young cinema, and talked to him about Berlin influencing the festival now and then, the selection process (2000 submissions each year!) and what films he’s interested in this year (e.g.: Mumblecore). Ticket sales start today, be sure to be quick, it sells out pretty fast.

Carson Chan is the founding member and head curator of Program, a nonprofit exhibition space for art and architecture in Berlin. He regularly writes for various art and cultural magazines such as 032c where he is also a contributing editor, and advises cultural institutions in Denmark and Italy. Along with Nadim Samman, Carson Chan was appointed curator for the 4th edition of the Marrakech Biennale in 2012.

Antje Stahl met Carson at his office at Program. He was sitting at a long wooden table, behind his back piles of catalogs on beveled book shelves, in front of him a silver laptop that could not possibly have been ignored, and thus, accidentally became the protagonist of the conversation: laptop as mobile home, as exhibition space, as party or the place where imagination expands.

It’s that time of the year again: Fashion Week! On this joyous occasion we went to Charlottenburg to discuss classic menswear with someone who should know: Christoph Tophinke, the mastermind behind the “Chelsea Farmer’s Club“.We met him in their tiny store on Bleibtreustraße, a cosy venue which they’ll soon exchange for a bigger space on the parallel Schlüterstraße 50. The new store will be a kind of living room for those who prefer to spend their Saturdays sipping fine drinks and enjoying sophisticated chatter. As long as it’s not about “fashion“, that is, because there’s so much more to the world than clothes. We tried, at least, discussing political dresscodes, stuffy Hamburg, and the crucial difference between socks and stockings…